While women in boardrooms around the world are still striving to match their pay packets to that of their male equals, there's one industry where the female gender command the highest pay checks: modelling.

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Just ask Andrej Pejic, the is-it-he-or-is-it-a-she androgynous catwalk sensation who's stealing fashion shoots from under the noses of the current crop of top girls. The Serbian-born, Australian-raised male might have walked in a catwalk show finale for Jean-Paul Gaultier, but he's not making as much as Anja, Freya and Arizona et al do by the hour.

"I don't get out of bed for less than $50 a day," he deadpanned in a recent interview with New York Mag. "I want to make that clear to America. This is a new age of androgynous supermodels. We don't get out of bed for less than $50 a day."

Willowy, blonde-haired Pejic, 19, was catapulted into modelling high-end women's fashion by none other than Carine Roitfeld, the revolutionary former editor of Vogue Paris. "Put him in Fendi!'" is what Pejic recalls Roitfeld saying unexpectedly on the shoot she was styling for the magazine. "My agency did ask me if I was comfortable with it, but I've been dressing in skirts since I was very little, so for me it was, 'Of course.'"

Indeed, it was aged 13 that a young Pejic dyed his hair blonde ('F**k it.' I let the platinum blonde out") and took to wearing skinny jeans. When he started experimenting with make-up, "It was to make myself feel happy, to look in the mirror and be satisfied. I never did drag or anything like that. It was always that I wanted to be pretty, to look beautiful, as a girl would want to" he says.

"When I first met Andrej, I didn't think, what a beautiful boy or girl," Storm model agent Sarah Doukas, who discovered Kate Moss, says. "I certainly didn't want to put him in one particular box." Taking a chance, Storm promptly promoted him both on their men's
and
women's books. It was the fifth agency that Pejic, who had moved to London especially to get a break, had visited. "I remember it was raining and horrible. I was walking in a street without an umbrella - it was a really dramatic, kind of movie moment - and I was just like, 'Oh my God, I came to London, I spent my mom's money, I'm not even gonna get an agency. It was like ­ Madonna going to Hollywood."

But Pejic got more than a listing with an agency - he was ranked 98 in FHM's sexiest women list online - but not without being the butt of the men's magazine jokes. 'Designers are hailing him as the next big thing. We think "thing" is quite accurate,' read the entry, which was later taken down after many complaints from readers.

Luckily, the surprise success of the modelling industry can turn to his family for support. "My mum follows everything and posts everything on Facebook and tells all her friends," says Pejic, adding that when she saw images of him dressed as the bride in Jean-Paul Gaultier's haute couture collection, she told the Australian program
Sunday Night
, "He's the most beautiful girl I'll ever see in a wedding dress."

But beside all the girlishness, Pejic has another, more surprising, aspiration. When his agent asks if he would like a date with New York's most eligible bachelor (who was checking Pejic out at a party), he answers: "I want to
be
the most eligible bachelor in New York City."